Posted
by
Soulskill
on Monday March 14, 2011 @10:20PM
from the on-a-roll dept.

skaet writes "Using CSS3 transforms and HTML5 canvas, the Katamari Hack for Google Chrome (and other compatible browsers) allows you to turn any website into a game of Katamari Damacy! The script was created by Alex Leone, David Nufer, and David Truong, and won the 2011 Yahoo HackU contest at University of Washington."

Amusingly, it does actually work quite well on IE(9). I agree though - standards-compliant websites should be described as such, not as "Chrome compatible." It's good that the script wasn't written in any way that woul require people to be using a specific browser or even specific rendering engine, so why describe it in such a manner?

IE9 and FF4 aren't really full-release yet, so I can see why someone might include those in their compatibility list. Likelihood of new compat. issues before release is slim, but I probably wouldn't pre-release browsers as a matter of habit.

IE9 and FF4 aren't really full-release yet, so I can see why someone might include those in their compatibility list.

Internet Explorer 9 has now been released, although it was after the summary was submitted. But Safari was released a long time ago, and it was Safari that gave us WebKit which powers Chrome. It seems bizarre to label it a "Chrome compatible" browser when it should be the other way around.

Anyway, the linked site says "works best in chrome or firefox 4", so not only do they mention Firefox but they also do not use the term "Chrome compatible".

However, I did find an article on this subject [engadget.com] from the day before

A warning needs to be attached to this game. Katamari is a dangerous game to play.

First you'll start, possibly with some friends, possibly high, rolling things up, and you'll be having a good time.

Then you'll be consumed with rolling things up, accurately guessing what size objects you can roll up, and developing strategies on how to gain size more effectively.

Eventually you'll get what we like to call "Katamari Eyes". This is when in real life, you start to see regular objects in groups, which could be good for rolling up, or areas you'll want to stay away from as there isn't enough growth potential. It's a well known effect.

This destroys relationships, but given you're reading this, I don't think that's a problem you'll have.

He's just documenting what a lot of us have experienced. Mailboxes are just the right size to roll up with a car. A motorcycle would be too big. Dogs and pedestrians are small enough but (fortunately) don't seem to trigger that reflex.

Just took my Katamari for a walk down Gene Ray's ode to insanity (scrollwheel to scroll down works fine, you can roll it straight down the middle). My Katamari was the size of my browser window and I wasn't even a tenth of the way down. Dude packs in a lot of text.

It's pretty fun to use in photostreams on Flickr.... all of the pictures swirling around the ball looks awesome.

Also... if you use it on Google Maps you can kind of actually play a game of Katamari! It really will pick up the map tiles (after it gets large enough) seems to grow extremely fast at that point though.... but I haven't played with the parameters too much yet.

I've been running it with the max number of items with Safari 5.0.3 on a 17" MBP without any trouble at all...

If you run this on the Katamari Hack page it looks just like a level in The Wonderful End of the World. Yes, I know that game is a complete rip-off of Katamari, but it has a level where you pick up words just like this level. And a much better theme song IMHO.